Mpls.St.Paul Magazine - Eat + Drink

Andrew Zimmern Wins James Beard Award

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:04:18 GMT

We're proud to announce that contributing writer, Andrew Zimmern, won a James Beard Foundation award for Outstanding Personality/Host for his Travel Channel show, Bizarre Foods America. Senior editor Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl was nominated for the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for her article, "The Cheese Artist," which appeared in the September 2012 issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and will be included in the book Best Food Writing 2012. See the full list of 2013 James Beard Foundation award winners here.

Burch: A New Steak House in Town

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:50:46 GMT

Red Cow

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:50:43 GMT

Red Cow

Born in an old Blockbuster building in south Minneapolis, Red Cow is a worthy exchange. Luke Shimp, formerly of the Blue Plate Restaurant Company, has thrown in his money and given the space a bit of a shine with a light industrial tavern feel.

It's mainly a burger story they are telling, but instead of entering the local battle for Juicy Lucy domination, or even treading too far into the beef-blend battle of snooty foodists, they are playing a slightly different game. Only about a third of the burgers are beef, and the rest are creative innovations that just might make you retool your definition. The earthy elk burger is done Wellington style in puff pastry with brie—it is a good and rich match. A salmon patty is formed with risotto, a better binder than bread crumbs, and given a lift by arugula and truffle aioli. The lamb burger didn’t really work for me, but the turkey burger with sliced radish and pistachios was a juicy world better than others I’ve had. And the curried chickpea veggie patty held a ton of great flavor, although it was a bit cheated by the bun to patty ratio. Of the beef burgers, the Barcelona was my favorite, with prosciutto, manchego, peppers, and smoked aioli. It was just the right kind of smoky, nutty flavor additions in a goodly mess that brought something new to the burger.

The rest of the menu has grinders and po’boys, fish ’n’ chips, and poutine, all the things you need in the modern tavern. And of course there are plenty of craft beers. But more important is the awesome tapped wine system, which allows 32 fresh wines by the glass. Burger and a beer might become burger and a burgundy before you know it. 3624 W. 50th St., Mpls., 612-767-4411, redcowmn.com —S. M.

After the Oceans

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:17:42 GMT

Mistakes were made.

Mostly not by us here in Minnesota, but in the oceans. Oceans such as the Atlantic, where wild salmon have had their population reduced 99 percent, where the cod of the Georges Bank became commercially extinct in the 1990s and show no sign of bouncing back, and where there are about as many wild breeding bluefin tuna remaining as there are wild breeding tigers, but no serious plan to stop commercial fishing. It’s happened before.

The mastodons of the Great Lakes region were hunted to extinction. When they were gone, presumably the Paleo-Indian Clovis hunters sighed and said: “Darn, we ate them all. I guess it’s buffalo from here out.” The auroch, the giant wild cattle that is the ancestor of all our domestic cattle, went extinct in 1627. Passenger pigeons, for which Minnesota’s Pigeon Bay and Pigeon Falls were named, were once so plentiful in our state that flocks would block the sun. The big 12-inch birds were potted, baked in pies, roasted, and piled on boats to sell in New York. The last known wild egg and bird were taken from a Minneapolis tree in 1895. People likely sighed and started eating chicken for dinner.

Mistakes were made and continue to be made in the oceans. But this time is different. Local visionaries are trying to solve those ocean problems. If you want to know what and how you’ll be eating in 2020, peek behind the closed doors of the dreamers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are poised to transform fish in our time by bringing them out of the ocean and into places you’d never suspect.

WAREHOUSE | To find Chad Hebert, Warren Burgess, and their 10,000 perch, go to the Cub Foods near the I-35/Hwy. 62 spaghetti junction and drive west past the apartments jangling with banda music until you see a low-slung, forgotten-looking warehouse, the kind of nothing brick building that litters the edge of every American city. Climb the handful of steps and open the steel door to the future, a future that looks like giant dad-built bunk beds.

These beds, made of plain lumber and sturdy bolts, are the core of Hebert and Burgess’s Urban Farm Project. Several hundred plants grow on the top bunks; the bottoms hold 2,000 perch each. Peer into the tank and the feed-trained fish start to roil toward the surface, like silver shards pulled by a magician’s wand. They are yellow perch, a little cousin of Minnesota’s favorite food fish, the walleye. They’re best pan-fried, says chef Lenny Russo of Heartland, who attests to these indoor-farmed fish. “They’re pristine, beautiful. The quality is outstanding. I’d have them on the menu all the time if I could.

Hebert and Burgess have been growing these fish for four years, but they’re still in the business-incubation stage. “The goal here is just to complete the puzzle,” Hebert told me, modestly.

Fish have been grown in captivity since antiquity; the earliest fish farmers were probably the Chinese, raising carp in ponds since 3,500 BC. What’s difficult about raising fish hasn’t changed: To successfully farm them you need to: a) keep them alive and disease-free with proper food and oxygen levels; b) breed them; c) feed them the specialized, often-live diet that they need in their early, invisible-to-the-naked-eye stage; and d) deal with their waste.

In nature, dozens, if not hundreds, of organisms interact to create a self-sustaining system that allows fish to exist. Fish excrete ammonia products, which are converted by beneficial bacteria to nitrite, which is converted by other beneficial bacteria called nitrobacter to nitrates, which plants use to grow. The plants are food to other fish and to bugs, which are food to the fish. The only difference between a pond and a box in a warehouse is everything, or nothing, depending on how you look at it. Hebert and Burgess are puzzling over how to make a box of fish in a warehouse exactly like a self-sustaining healthy lake, with plants cleaning the water of fish waste. Only they want to sell the plants. So the puzzle is actually how to make a box of fish in a warehouse exactly like a self-sustaining healthy lake that produces a sustainable, incessant three-course gourmet protein- and vegetable-rich meal.

On those vast bunk beds, Hebert and Burgess are growing tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs. They are also growing flowering impatiens, not to eat, but because they provide a ladybug habitat to control the aphids that eat garden plants. Pesticides, herbicides, other biocides, and synthetic fertilizers are banned here because they kill fish. Hebert and Burgess are also raising 14,000 red wiggler worms, which turn post-harvest plant waste, such as tomato stems or lettuce roots, into the soil in which new plants will grow.

To make all this happen, pumps run at 22 gallons a minute to draw water from fish tanks up to the top bunk, where the water is sprayed continuously onto the oxygen-producing plants in their soil. The water runs through the soil, where it is filtered by soil, roots, and the beneficial bacteria that live there. The water then drops in a frothy stream back into the fish tank, becoming highly oxygenated as it falls. No wastewater is ever returned to Minneapolis sewers.

“We have water in there that’s four years old,” explains Hebert. They do have to add water, about 60 gallons a week, per tank, because of plant transpiration and absorption, and because of simple evaporation, with all that water roiling around. To see if the water in the air can bring in more money, Hebert and Burgess are now trying to grow mushrooms in bags that hang like ghosts from the ceiling.

“I am 100 percent an accidental farmer,” says Hebert, who looks, with his soul patch and Carhartts, more like a coffee-shop laptop jockey than a farmer. “This all started as a hobby, and I saw the opportunity and went with it. The demand in the marketplace is there. We know how to grow the fish, but there are a lot of other pieces of the puzzle."

The pieces are falling into place. They’ve figured out breeding because bringing in other people’s young fish brings in disease. They’ve mastered raising the live zooplankton baby fish eat. Hebert just completed Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point training so he can process the fish himself and sell filets to the public. Soon they’ll launch an e-commerce site to sell fish and produce direct.

"We never wanted to get ahead of ourselves and grow a million fish before the whole puzzle is figured out,” explains Hebert. “That’s how people go bust.” Hebert’s day job is taking care of his two young boys, while his wife, who holds a PhD in food science microbiology, works at General Mills. At night he tends to his plants and fish. “We want safe, high-quality, nutritionally dense food,” explains Hebert. “

"Fish in a lake have all the contaminants the lake has—mercury, heavy metals, PCBs, whatever. You can eat these fish three times a day.” With that, he waves a hand over the tank, and the perch surge up again, the straining silver shiver of them. Here it is, the future, in heavy-load-bearing bunk beds, with mushrooms on top.

OUTBUILDING | An hour east of Minneapolis, past the St. Croix River, up where the green and rolling hills of Wisconsin echo with the footfalls of some of the most productive dairy cows in all the world, there’s a dairy farm. Anyone who’s driven backcountry Wisconsin knows the type, those telltale low-slung barns with big sliding doors, a ground-down outdoor divot made by mud-mucking Holsteins, and feed silos tracing castle spires on the horizon. Across the flat road from this particular dairy farm, there’s a nothing of an outbuilding, something flat and impermanent looking with a small white sign on the front carefully lettered in green: Future Farm.

Steve Meyer, co-owner and director of operations, pulls up in a white pickup truck and leads me through the foot-sanitizer bath that separates the future from dirty boots. Inside, at first glance, there’s a whole lot of nothing—but it turns out that’s the space for the coming expansion, and the fish processing area.

To one side of the big empty space are a half-dozen blue tanks, some filled with tilapia, others with albino catfish, and one small one filled with an experiment: freshwater prawns. “We just got them. They’re probably going to try to start eating each other,” explains Meyer. “Some people blind them so they can’t see each other to eat each other. They’re cannibalistic.”

Meyer doesn’t want to blind these cannibalistic freshwater Wisconsin shrimp; he’s hoping he can give them enough space that they can each establish their own territory and live in peace. This territory is beneath Target executives’ salad. The water from the various fish tanks is pumped out of the fish tanks and into long, shallow, rectangular rivers in an adjacent greenhouse. The greenhouse is fitted with foam rafts, large rectangles of sterile material with half-dollar-shaped holes punched into them. Every hole receives a baby lettuce plant, or a baby basil plant, a baby arugula plant, or similar, and is set into the head of the river. Each day a raft of mature plants is removed from the terminus of the river and harvested. This makes room for another raft of babies at the top. To look at one of these slow-moving rivers of plants is to see a simple size-order progression from sprout to maturity. Meyer estimates Future Farm can harvest about 500 cases of lettuce a week, most of which goes to the Twin Cities, Madison, and Eau Claire, especially to the cafeterias at Target, Medtronic, the Carlson Companies, Carleton, and St. Olaf, all of which have programs in place that prioritize buying local.

If the freshwater shrimp can live under the rafts of greens, Wisconsin could become as well known for its fresh shrimp as it is for its cheese curds—and both will be because of the cows. The considerable heat required to keep the plants and fish warm all comes from Wisconsin cows. John Vrieze, Future Farm’s co-owner, has a 1,000-head conventional, high-volume dairy herd across the street and a herd of 1,700 cows in nearby Emerald, Wisconsin. The manure from the cows is converted in something called an anaerobic digester into a usable and pure variety of methane, which heats the greenhouse.

Future Farm put its first fish in tanks in 2008 and has been working out the kinks since then. The capital costs have been intensive; for instance, the greenhouse requires multiple sources of backup heat, in case a farm system breaks. (Tropical tilapia and summer basil have no ability to maintain themselves at Wisconsin’s January temperatures.) Meyer is a manufacturing engineer by trade, and no kind of wide-eyed dreamer. “I am not an environmentalist,” he says flatly. “I got into this as a business. This is the future. It’s pretty obvious. This has been all self-funded. We put in for our first USDA grant just now. We should be a flagship in the state for what we do, but most people just don’t get it.”

Meyer notes that Future Farm is at its break-even point now and all the puzzles for their own particular system have been solved, except placing excess produce in the event a restaurant client, such as Minneapolis clients Birchwood Cafe or the Red Stag, has a slow week and drops the volume of its pre-order. They’re working on developing other channels for the produce, perhaps as Future Farm branded frozen fish and herb dinners. Today, Future Farm has five full-time employees and is getting ready to expand. “I’d like to play with eels,” notes Meyer, “And baitfish, maybe freshwater stingrays for aquariums. I think aquaponics and alternative energy, it’s the only way. It’s going to explode in popularity. I’d love to have one of these with a garden center, a couple restaurants attached; the whole thing would be a weekend destination. The key is to making the whole thing click. We’ll see how the prawns do.”

In their tank, the prawns are pale, almost see-through, and climb on a metal cage, not unlike children on monkey bars, their antennae wriggling, as they try to sense one another. They are wholly unaware of the nearby warm rivers, the cows who make it warm, or, so far, their tasty freshwater prawn brothers, waving their own antennae.

BREWERY | In east St. Paul, the abandoned Hamm’s Brewery looms over the city like a brick fortress, with walls nearly a meter thick, surrounded by acres of parking lot. These walls and floors were created to hold the weight of yacht-sized brewing tanks. A new company called Urban Organics is planning to use this old weight-bearing mega-structure to hold enormous tilapia-filled fish tanks and grow vegetables in an effort to provide safe, nutritious food to schoolchildren. Hamm’s slogan still echoes in these walls: “From the land of sky blue waters, from the land of pines’ lofty balsams, comes the beer refreshing, Hamm’s the beer refreshing.” We’re all familiar with the song that mourns tearing down paradise to put up a parking lot—but what is the song to sing when the nostalgic center of sky blue waters becomes the abandoned parking lot, and then that is replaced with fish that won’t be polluted by the mercury of the sky blue waters? Fred Haberman, Dave and Kristen Koontz Haider, and Chris Ames intend to put up a bit of post-apocalyptic paradise.

CAMPUS | The horticulture department at the University of Minnesota is famous as the birthplace of the Honeycrisp apple, the Frontenac grape, and other cold-climate superstars. Today, peek into its greenhouses and you’ll find lobster. Well, not lobster exactly, but Australian red-claw crawfish, a freshwater crustacean that can grow to more than a pound.

The U of M is launching its first aquaculture class, a collaboration between the horticulture and fisheries departments. They will have a warm-water greenhouse for crayfish and a cold-water greenhouse for trout. “A generation ago,” says horticulture professor John Erwin, “students were interested in large-scale production. Now students want to know about smaller-scale but sustainable systems.”

Erwin thinks the successful aquaculture businesses in Minnesota will produce small niche crops—shrimp or red claw crayfish.

“People want to support agriculture which doesn’t have a negative impact on the environment, people don’t want to eat pesticides, and people would like to eat food that’s ripe. The tomatoes and strawberries that are harvested before they reach what we would call ripe, and gassed for color, are not liked. Restaurants [in the Twin Cities] deserve a lot of the credit for creating this new market for what we call specialty crops. People like Kim Bartmann and Lucia Watson have led the movement, promoting local food, showing that amazing food can be made with local ingredients. They helped establish the market. Now it’s there, and now there is a new generation of students who want to sell to it."

As part of this new class, students will reach out to restaurants and farmers’ market shoppers to ask what they would pay a premium for if it was available locally. “My students don’t seem to want to be the next Tyson of fish but to make a nice, regular, sustainable income,” he says. Two former students are Dean Engelmann and Scott Endres, co-owners of south Minneapolis’s Wise Acre, a restaurant that sources much of its food from its own farm and greenhouse. Imagine the restaurants of the future stocked with Minnesota-raised oysters, lobsters, and trout.

BASEMENT | Gandhi Mahal, a small Indian restaurant in south Minneapolis, is building a tilapia aquaponics facility in the basement. “We are using the basement because we try to use all the spaces here,” says Ruhel Islam, the restaurant’s owner. “It is a three-phase project. We completed phases one and two: feasibility, cost, sourcing the right system. Now we are starting phase three: installing it. We are going to start with a 500-gallon tank and grow if we need to."

In addition to tilapia, Islam intends to grow specialty Thai chili peppers, spinach, and cilantro. He plans to net fish to order, for the freshest quality but also for inventory control. No fish will ever be going bad in his cooler.

“To be sustainable and self-sufficient is part of my mission, to grow as much food as we can. Our cooking oil is recycled for biodiesel. Last year we harvested 2,000 pounds of vegetables from our urban garden. It’s important to customers, but important to my own philosophy. I believe in self-sufficiency and am concerned about food cost and food security. I know how to raise fish. I did it back home in my village, near Bangladesh."

DINER | The Duluth Grill is a diner in Duluth; it used to be an Embers franchise. “We are putting the tanks into our aquaponic system today,” Duluth Grill urban farm manager Francois Medion told me one day in March. “We hope to have the fish in soon. We are thinking pacu—they’re sort of like a vegetarian piranha. We would like them to eat scraps we get from cleaning vegetables—lettuce bottoms, that sort of thing.

“What’s unique for me,” says the French native, who is best known in the Twin Cities for his career as Loring Cafe’s bread baker, “is that the Duluth Grill is a diner. It’s affordable, you get a large portion—simple good food. Usually the restaurants that cook from scratch are fine dining. We have only a 5,000-gallon tank, and this is a very busy place. We’re never going to provide year-round enough fish for the restaurant, but we can have some fish frys with our own fish and build from there."

WAREHOUSE | Walk into Dave Roeser’s squat warehouse in Maplewood and you’ll find a series of interconnected fish tanks. His son, Bryan Roeser, a biologist, convinced him that they could crack the code to aquaponics here, so the family designed a series of original systems that maximize energy consumption.

First, there’s a cold-water tank of 10,000 rainbow trout, about the size of the container on a moving truck, where cold tap water comes into the building. Once the water is warmed and dirtied up by the rainbow trout, it is pumped into a series of closed-top tanks holding 20,000 tilapia. The water leaves the tilapia tanks and enters one of several original aquaponic setups.

The “lettuce factory,” as Roeser calls one of them, is all vertical: columns of light flanked by growing panels, each of which slips into a slot, and each of which has holes bored into it. Small lettuce or herb plants are tucked into the holes and grow toward the light. Water from the tilapia tanks drips along the dark root-side feeding the plants. It gets to the bottom, is captured, filtered, and returned to the tilapia tanks. When the plants are mature, the panels are simply slipped out of their frame, the mature plants plucked from their holes and baby plants tucked in to replace them. The “orbital garden” is a rotating barrel with light bulbs in the center and the plants in holes on the outside of the barrel, growing in. The barrel turns through a pool of fish water, the roots becoming fully dipped and then going up and around in a circle.

The Roesers claim to be able to get as much out of their interior acre as an outdoor farmer would get from 100 acres. Dave Roeser is not an environmentalist; he’s a businessman. “We thought about current trends which are going to be here a long time—green, natural, and people worried about what’s really in their food. But there aren’t actually a lot of commercial ventures going on to meet that market, and because there aren’t a lot of commercial ventures, there isn’t the right equipment to make it function profitably and sustainably. So we decided to develop our own equipment.”

Garden Fresh Farms already has contracts with Bon Appétit catering and US Foods, and the Roesers are on the hunt for a second space near the Minneapolis Farmers Market. Eventually, they see their venture as licensed farms where they provide setup, a farm manager, and marketing services. This could be especially valuable to resorts, reservations, cruise ships, and anywhere else a good deal of people need to be fed.

“About 80 percent of the cost of produce is actually due to transportation,” says Dave Roeser. “Not just the fuel, but the product loss that happens during transport. If we can grow things very close to people so you don’t have that cost, and that waste, we feel confident. Basil, oregano, thyme, these are all things we can grow very well, and bib, curly bib, oak lettuce, leaf lettuce.”

He doesn’t harvest a plant without an order, and he doesn’t plant one either. He also, unlike nearly every other farmer in Minnesota, is indifferent to the threat of hail. He likes to say that every sprouting seed in every tray is already sold: “If the issue is fresh and good, we feel very competitive.”

Peeking behind doors of the gee-whiz, green, integrated, zero-waste, beneficial-bacteria-fueled, thoughtful, entrepreneurial future of dreamers who are changing the world for the better, before our very eyes, I became thoroughly depressed. While people on cable television fight over whether climate change is political fact or fiction, the people who move units of food are not debating anything. They’ve moved into post-apocalyptic planning, because that’s where we are when it comes to nearly free wild food from the fin-filled sea.

But then it occurred to me: What if people had started eating chicken before we ate every passenger pigeon? These Minnesota fish farms and experiments may in fact represent the first time people get the chance to do the hardest thing of all: to catch ourselves mid-freefall and course-correct. Mistakes were made, and mostly not by us in Minnesota, but that doesn’t mean we can’t lead the way out, for all.

Hmong House

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:53:21 GMT

I am perversely drawn to one particular detail in the lavish murals that decorate the walls at North St. Paul’s new Hmong House, and it’s not perhaps the nicest detail to pull out for deeper consideration. The extravagant, expansive murals that offer hand-painted wrap-around views of Indochina in the spring, rendered in a hundred shades of pale and first-rains-of-spring green, make it appear not so much like you are looking down from a great height into the perfect misty valleys of Laos or Thailand, but more like you’re looking down from the left hand of God to heaven as it was made material in southeastern Asia. And heaven is hard to behold, in the mind, in art, anywhere, which is why I think I am so perversely drawn to a particular detail of the mural, off to one corner, where electrical outlets have been incorporated in a sort of trompe l’oeil effect into the pillars of a rough sign and barricade in a bit of brutal, splintered, and realistic prison-edge that makes the yards and yards of heaven lovingly rendered all the more heartbreaking. This is what you want, this is what you get. The heaven of a free lush countryside, the awful mechanics of war and exile.

Of course, I could be projecting a romantic bit of nonsense unsupported by the electrical outlets. But there’s so much going on at Hmong House—visually, culinarily, culturally—that first visits can feel like the first hours at Disneyland. Everywhere you rest your eyes there’s something so extraordinary to see that the mind can’t begin to take it all in. So you have to make sense where you can.

Overhead, for instance, there’s a pillar ringed by 18 candy-colored streamers, each anchored with a glittering cardboard pendant fashioned to display the 18 Hmong clan names. To the west there’s an imposing double portrait of owner Pa See Yang and his wife, Kay, done in the hyperrealist, looking-to-the-future style favored by modern Asian totalitarian dictators—a portrait that becomes even more drenched with unnerving significance by the incessant presence of Pa See Yang himself, who typically pops by every table, at every meal, nodding and friendly, working the room so easily he practically seems to twinkle as he goes. With the picture and the man, the mind reels.

The place is also the size of a high school gym and sometimes the young Hmong ladies will avoid you, feeling shy—so you have to find Yang, who twinkles at you and frowns at them, sending them running, which is a lot to think about too. There is often a musician playing an amplified keyboard, crooning Hmong pop. Once, a dozen young Hmong ladies on a bachelorette outing dropped by and line danced in slow, synchronized lope, as if they were dancing underwater.

We’ve never had a Hmong restaurant like this in the Twin Cities. Hmong are, of course, the people who were chased out of their homeland in mainland China generations ago, eventually settling in the hills of southeast Asia, where they became staunch allies of the West through several wars. The Hmong helped the French fight the Axis powers during World War II, then helped the French and Americans fight Communists in Vietnam. When the Vietnam War was abandoned, the triumphant Communists launched a campaign of genocide against the Hmong, driving many surviving Hmong into Thai refugee camps. Eventually, they were resettled in the lands of their former allies, especially the United States and France.

The 2010 census put the number of Hmong living in Minnesota at more than 66,000, though many argue the number is greater, because of the difficulties in counting a population whose members may not speak English, might distrust government, and move frequently. In any event, with 66,000 people you think we’d have a restaurant or two—but that hasn’t really been the case. Or at least not the sort of restaurant that serves appetizers and entrees, has a liquor license, and takes credit cards, as Hmong House does. The only place that people have been able to buy Hmong food has been at a few grocery store grab-and-go counters and the food courts at the two big Hmong multi-vendor malls: Hmongtown, near the state capitol building in St. Paul, and Hmong Village near Lake Phalen.

Fittingly enough, Hmong House’s owner, Yang, got his start in food at Hmong Village, which he used as a business incubator to try out his fresh-every-day rice noodles for the traditional dish pad se-ew. They were as big a hit as Yang had hoped. He moved here from Atlanta—after a Thai refugee camp, resettlement in Hawaii, high school in Wisconsin, college in Illinois, and stints working in Kansas City and Georgia—to pursue his dream of owning a Hmong restaurant, a career change from prior stints in airlines and hotels.

Yang sold his Hmong Village noodle stand and poured everything he had into this new spot, hiring a young chef, Yia Cheng, and bringing in a cousin to paint the murals. Hmong House opened last summer, and it’s a must-visit for anyone living in the Twin Cities. Though not necessarily on a Saturday night, as most of the restaurant’s business is in fact Hmong weddings, for which it closes down nearly every Saturday (just call ahead to make sure it’s open to the public).

When you do go, start with an order of papaya salad, made in the Thai way with lots of cherry tomatoes and often with other fresh vegetables like peppery eggplant. Add an order of pad se-ew—slippery, gossamer rice noodles as tender as custard, made with your choice of fried squares of tofu or thin stir-fried slices of meat—and you’re off to a great start in understanding Hmong food, the earthy, garden-driven beauty of it, the hearty simplicity and joy of it.

For any old hand with Asian restaurants, one of the issues with Hmong food is that you immediately try to identify what’s Thai and what’s Chinese—don’t do that. After a few years of eating Hmong, my best advice is to think about it the way you would Alsatian food. Hmong has an adjacency—some similarities and some differences—to the other southeast Asian cuisines in the same way that Alsatian food has many similarities, many overlaps, and some differences from French food.

One of the truly, uniquely Hmong dishes is the Mother’s Herb Whole Chicken Soup, a vast tureen of soup traditionally given to Hmong mothers after the birth of a child. The broth for the soup is cloudy, plain, and pure, just chickeny and good. There are skin-on segments of chicken in every bowl, the plain broth and boiled chicken deepened with dark tangles of bitter herb. Purely Hmong too is the celebration dish of sweet pork and eggs, here called Five-Spice Sweet Braised Pork, an insanely rich concoction of well-lacquered pork belly chunks, hard-boiled eggs, brown sugar, five spice powder, and scallions, all of which come together in a hot pot. Read on the palate as the richest, most luxurious dish ever concocted—it’s like a chocolate pot de crème, for an entrée. It’s made to share.

For solo dining, another uniquely Hmong dish is the excellent larrb salad, here made with cooked chicken torn into tiny pieces and tossed with lots of fresh cilantro, mint, and basil. It’s less lemongrass and chili soaked than most of the other local versions, and I like it better, as it has a kitchen-garden freshness and forthrightness that makes it elemental. Another Hmong dish is the changbang stir-fry—a tumble of meat and chili peppers that reminds a restaurant hound of Sichuan food, with graceful herbal notes.

Hmong barbecue, as popularized at the food courts, has become something of a local cult sensation. There are a few excellent versions on Hmong House’s menu, not to be missed by any local carnivore. First there are the thin-sliced, crisp-grilled beef short ribs, which are beefy and deep-tasting. Then there’s the tangy, plump Hmong sausage, made with lots of lemongrass, an undeniable triumph of plump, salty lemon richness. Still, it’s Yang’s own invention called PaTxhim slow-cooked ribs, perhaps inspired from his years in Kansas City and then Georgia, that I think is the restaurant’s strongest dish. The chef takes a rack of pork ribs, steams them, glazes then roasts them, and serves the ribs with candied walnuts and everything you need to make lettuce wraps, including big lettuce leaves, herbs, and finely chopped vegetables. On the side, the hot sauce the staff only calls Hmong pepper is a finely chopped combination of chili, cilantro, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, and magic that brings heat, light, and unity in a way that only the greatest condiments can.

I requested take-home containers for my Hmong pepper on my last visit, so I could look at this at home without distraction. I saw minutely cut chili and garlic, finely minced cilantro, a wealth of lavish detail that’s all but impossible to appreciate in the moment. Still, as delectable as the Hmong pepper was at home, I prefer it in its natural environment, one of a hundred details, any of which can overwhelm you, and any of which can open you to a world of lavish, unimaginable joy.

Hmong House
2112 11th Ave. N., North St. Paul, 651-492-0451

Eggs en Cocotte

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:53:39 GMT

1 | The Lowry

This breakfast-menu star goes by its alternative name of shirred eggs here, though it is none the less creamy and elegant with bits of ham, mushroom, and a hint of truffle. 2112 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-341-2112, thelowryuptown.com

2 | Mona

It works as well on a small-plates dinner menu. This dish achieves sophistication as the soft egg is enhanced by garlic confit, creamed spinach, a bit of wild rice, and rutabaga in a sturdy pastry shell. 333 S. 7th St., Ste. 190, Mpls., 612-259-8636, monarestaurant.com

3 | Grand Café

Served during brunch, this version pulls a little Gruyère cheese and ham into the vessel, which happens to be a flaky, buttery puff pastry shell. 3804 Grand Ave. S., Mpls., 612-822-8260, grandcafempls.com

CSA Time

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:27:17 GMT

It’s that time of year when the smell of mud and melting things makes you actually optimistic that things will once again grow here in the frosty North! Maybe that’s why we consider April to be CSA time.

This is the 12th year of Seward Co-op’s Community Supported Agriculture Fair, during which local farmers and eaters converge in a parking lot for an afternoon of something like speed dating. On April 13, more than 30 farmers will be there for the meeting and greeting while you, the eater, get to check out what they’re growing for the year. If you find a farmer that matches your tastes, you can sign up for a CSA share, which is like a pre-paid subscription to the year’s crops.

For a quick primer on questions to ask your farmer, as well as a great downloadable CSA directory, check out landstewardshipproject.org.

Also a good resource to have on hand, the Department of Agriculture’s Minnesota Grown Directory lists nearly 1,000 local farms and will be sent to you for free.

Optimism, thy month is April. Seward Co-op, seward.coop; Minnesota Grown, www3.mda.state.mn.us/mngrown

Malabari Kitchen

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:07:20 GMT

The French Hen

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:03:03 GMT

The trend of everyday brunch is happily alive at 518 Selby. The spot that was once Bon Vie is now under new ownership as The French Hen, owned and operated by the Rivard family, who also own the adjacent flower shop. It’s a warm, friendly neighborhood café with a casual, laid-back ethos, perfect for the brunch set. Eggs are your best bet, and the poached set that came with the Creole Market Hash ran perfectly into the spicy root vegetables and smoked ham, making a delicious mess. The egg crowning the Croque Suzette wasn’t as perfectly cooked, but the sandwich is a rich monster of airy bread, Gruyère, and bright mustard, making it a substantial meal. On a croissant, the French Quarter breakfast sandwich is an eye-opener with andouille sausage, onions, Cajun spice, and cheese. Omelets, as well, ring tried and true, as this is a place for an honest morning of hearty food. 518 Selby Ave., St. Paul, 651-222-6201, frenchhencafe.com

Ward 6

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:20:16 GMT

While we all can’t stop talking about the hot and popping food neighborhoods in the cities (Linden Hills, Lowertown, and North Loop come to mind), there are so many more ’hoods that desperately need just one little place to up the ante. Honestly, that’s what it feels like over on Payne Avenue on the East Side of St. Paul, which someone realized was an area worth popping.

There’s a little bit of both brilliance and risk in the idea that you should serve some outside-the-line food in a neighborhood that is served by Little Caesars. But it ends up that the force behind Ward 6 chose wisely. The rehabbed tavern has been packed since day one with families, beer-o-philes, oldsters, and the like seeking warmth, comfort, and something a little more, a little different.

Now let’s not get expectations out of whack—it’s still a tavern, one with a local beer focus. In fact, one entire section of the menu is called Food for Drinking—I can respect that. Here you will find the solid in a weekly meatball, some crispy-gorgeous fries, and hands-down amazing beef-fat-fried fish ’n’ chips with a destructively flaky, crisp coating. Maybe too far a reach, pork belly skewers with lemon gastrique didn’t quite reach the right quality, and poutine just fell thin and flat. Consistency might be the biggest challenge.

The grilled Camembert sandwich with pears and arugula was quite refreshing and surprising, as was the frighteningly devilish Fatty Melt, which uses grilled cheese sandwiches as the bun for a burger. What can I say, it was a bomb, and it worked. Bigger plates include some nicely spiced pork ribs with Korean-style slaw and a flavorful Cicero stew, a vegetarian and gluten-free option with tomatoey chickpeas and sweet potatoes over rice that was more than a token on the menu.

The service is very friendly, the atmosphere warm and inviting, and it seems clear the neighborhood has been starving for something like this, so who knows what could pop next? 858 Payne Ave., St. Paul, 651-348-8181, ward6stpaul.com